Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Jingle-ism

If you watch all the Red Sox games on NESN like I do, you have the same annoying jingles and tunes running through your head all day long that I have. I'm actually rooting for someone to hijack a Southwest plane or hold up an Eastern Bank with the demands that they stop playing those stupid songs. One of these ad jingles is the source of much controversy within my mind, though. It's for a car company. Wacky dealers talk to hip young customers and then the song starts. When I first heard it, I assumed it was yet another "tame female vocal"-type song that's become ubiquitous in ads. But as I started to decipher the lyrics, I realized the song wasn't by some band from Wisconsin that moved to Brooklyn with a hand-picked, non-threatening, front-woman who would be considered "quirky" in the early 90s but is now completely average--this was an actual jingle written specifically for the commercial. The first line was something like "your local friendly Chevrolet dealer..."

But here's what "intrigued" me about the song. It would always get cut off at the end of the commercial right at what I would consider the "dynamic" moment of the tune. In the third line, she sings the word "favorite" in a higher note than the rest of the song, which just drones along. She's clearly headed for a different key. I'm thinking, "just as the song's about to go somewhere, they cut it off!" I had to know where that song "went"! It reminded me of the SeaLab theme. Imagine if that shit got cut off right when she goes "cuz that is where..." and you just never found out what came next? This was killing me. I just kept singing "make your FAVORI--" over and over, wondering....

I finally turned to our old pal El Internetio. I found talk of the ad campaign itself, which, it turns out, is based on the American version of the Office. What? Yeah, apparently advertisers do all this shit that people "in the industry" know about and appreciate, but when they run the ads, they don't actually explain it. So what looks to us like a dealer talking to a customer with supposedly witty, Twit-ified dialogue, is actually an "episode" of a would-be car-dealership sit-com. The dealers even have names!

On one page I found the full version of what appears to be the "theme" of the fake sit-com. Maybe if they had run this commercial first, we all would have known the premise of this kooky dealership. Or maybe I missed it. But anyway, the full song plays. So I got to hear where the song went. A huge relief. She's actually singing, "at the nation's FAVorite car com-pany..." (Here's that page--note they get that lyric wrong when they transcribe it.) Still a pretty crappy song, though.

But the saga doesn't end there! That all happened just before the All-Star break. Then, last week, after not having watched NESN and their repetitive tunage for almost a full week, I turned on the first game of the second half, and there was the commercial in question. But wait...something sounded off. The song now sounds like it's playing on a transistor radio...and guess what? Just as they get to "the line"...the lyrics stop! They just loop the music with no vocal! They play the first two lines, then the cut off the entire third line, which is the "favorite" line!

Obviously the cutting off of the song right at the key moment proved to be an issue. So instead of just lengthening it so we could all hear it, they cut it off before the line even starts. Was this fucking with people's minds, as it did mine, so much that they had to change it? And why did they lose audio quality? Isn't it weird that the one part of the one commercial I was obsessed with was altered? And shouldn't these fuckers just play the "Office" version of the ads so we know what the hell is going on at that dealership? The whole thing is so weird. I guess if you missed the original and you listen for the song tonight, you won't know what I mean with the cut-off lyric, but you will hear where the lyric now stops and the music loops.

Anyway, this post isn't a commercial. It's me talking about a commercial. That's different. I don't do ads. And just to prove it--if I really was shilling for Chevy, would I tell you that Chevy was actually behind the Pearl Harbor attack? No, I wouldn't. But they were.

People keep telling me THEY found the link that I posted above or that they can't find it or whatever. The full version of the song is, and always has been, linked in the original post above. (Where it says "Here's that page".)

OMG! Thanks so much for posting this article and link to the entire song, cause like you, I was going crazy trying to figure out what the song was and who sang it and now I get how it fits into the "Chevy picture". They should show the sitcom-like commercial on tv.